Finishing up Billy y las botas… and reflections!

I wanted to wrap up a few activities that I completed with Billy y las botas before break! I also want to include a few ideas that I would change next time.

I was really bad at pre-teaching vocabulary. I assumed (incorrectly) that students would pick up the vocabulary as I was reviewing it. When I realized it, I reviewed the vocabulary and made a Kahoot with it! This was the first Kahoot with videos that I made, and I really liked it! I used this during the part where the tall man was grabbing Billy and the boots were encouraging him to jump.

While many times, I wanted to talk about the book, I recognize that it can be difficult for some students to always pay attention to me. One day, I broke out the individual whiteboards as we were reading. Another day, I asked the main questions and put the “bigger idea” questions into PearDeck. I think it is important to recognize that it is difficult for some students to sit and listen without something else to do.

I made sure to complete a cloze activity that I found online for El Burrito Sabanero before that section in the book. My students enjoyed this song! It was also a nice way to incorporate culture into the book.

I also utilized the Teacher’s Guide for awesome activities like Matamoscas!

To finish up our unit, the students completed a Fishbowl activity with the pictures from the novel. We practiced the Pecha Kucha as well as the students had a chance to complete this activity in small groups before they completed this for an assessment. I allowed them to pick any four pictures from the novel as long as they had not previously been used by another group in the class.

While groups were completing this activity, my other students wrote up different creative versions of this text. I allowed them to use the book as well.

In the end, we had a bit of time for a Smashdoodle. I wish that we had had more time for this! Here are some of my students’ mostly unfinished (but still awesome!) Smashdoodles:

There are many things that I liked about my unit! I really enjoyed Billy, and my students did too based on their feedback. I would say that this is the most successful book that I have incorporated with my students. I obviously need to keep pre-teaching vocabulary, and I think that would have been a bit more successful. I could have stretched this unit out to include a few more days especially post graphic novel including another digital storytelling time and more time to finish the smashdoodles. I would encourage you to try out this graphic novel with students!